Conservatives: Toryism versus industrial capitalism

Many years ago, G. M. Young noted a paradox of the Victorian era. “In a money-making age,” he observed, “opinion was, on the whole, more deferential to birth than to money,” and “in a mobile and progressive society, most regard was had to the element which represented immobility, tradition, and the past.” This deference (and the tension underlying it) shaped the character of English Conservatism. The reconstruction of Conservatism in the Victorian and Edwardian periods was a two-way process. The Tory party shifted its base from the land to property in all its forms, making room for the new middle classes. By 1918, in A. J. P. Taylor's phrase, the party had “caught up with the modern world.” Yet only in part. Many of the values and attitudes of Toryism lived on within the reconstituted party, alongside industrial and capitalistic values. The party continued to invoke the rustic spirit of the nation. Conservatism was enamored of rural England, as much an England of the mind as of reality. Conservatives imbued with the Southern Metaphor of the nation tended to look askance at a number of central characteristics of industrial capitalism – its ugliness (or at least untidiness), its “materialism,” and its instability.